It's hard to imagine a more needed contribution to America's immigration debate than Reihan Salam's civil, sober, and penetrating Melting Pot or Civil War? At a moment when the major dueling discourses revolve around lurid depictions of immigrant crime by one side, and appeals to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty and accusations of racism by the other, Salam's data-driven argument about the future consequences of today's immigration choices could not be more timely.
Salam's case is that America's legal immigration system needs be reformed on lines roughly similar to what the Trump administration now and others before it have long advocated: changing the rules to place a greater emphasis on the economic skills of immigrants while deemphasizing the role played by family "Reunification" would ensure both that new immigrants are an economic plus to the economy and that they are more likely to integrate into the American cultural mainstream.
The families such immigrants form tend to be poor as well: today's immigrants face headwinds to upward mobility that the storied Ellis Island generations did not.
The data Salam deploys is not overly dramatic but decisive nonetheless: children of immigrants now make up 30 percent of all low-income children; roughly half of immigrant families have incomes within 200 percent of the poverty line; nearly a third of immigrant children grow up in families headed by someone without a high school diploma; the average Mexican immigrant has 9.4 years of schooling, rising to 12 in the second generation but flatlining after that.
The larger the number of immigrants is from a given country, the lower their average earnings and educational outcomes will be in the U.S. Conversely, the harder it is for a given group to enter the United States, the more likely it is that immigrants will be drawn from the top of their country's pecking order.
Of course immigrants have children, at rates far higher than the native born, and the children of lower-skilled immigrants make up a continually growing share of Americans at or near the poverty level.
"The children of elite immigrants make their way into America's elite, where they add a much needed dash of superficial diversity, enough to make us forget their inconvenient working class counterparts." The result, of which there is already ample evidence among the Millennial cohort of immigrant children, is a growing population which has grown up in poverty, isn't doing especially well in income or education, and perceives the American dream cynically, as a kind of whites-only sham.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-not-a-merit-based-immigration-system/
Salam's case is that America's legal immigration system needs be reformed on lines roughly similar to what the Trump administration now and others before it have long advocated: changing the rules to place a greater emphasis on the economic skills of immigrants while deemphasizing the role played by family "Reunification" would ensure both that new immigrants are an economic plus to the economy and that they are more likely to integrate into the American cultural mainstream.
The families such immigrants form tend to be poor as well: today's immigrants face headwinds to upward mobility that the storied Ellis Island generations did not.
The data Salam deploys is not overly dramatic but decisive nonetheless: children of immigrants now make up 30 percent of all low-income children; roughly half of immigrant families have incomes within 200 percent of the poverty line; nearly a third of immigrant children grow up in families headed by someone without a high school diploma; the average Mexican immigrant has 9.4 years of schooling, rising to 12 in the second generation but flatlining after that.
The larger the number of immigrants is from a given country, the lower their average earnings and educational outcomes will be in the U.S. Conversely, the harder it is for a given group to enter the United States, the more likely it is that immigrants will be drawn from the top of their country's pecking order.
Of course immigrants have children, at rates far higher than the native born, and the children of lower-skilled immigrants make up a continually growing share of Americans at or near the poverty level.
"The children of elite immigrants make their way into America's elite, where they add a much needed dash of superficial diversity, enough to make us forget their inconvenient working class counterparts." The result, of which there is already ample evidence among the Millennial cohort of immigrant children, is a growing population which has grown up in poverty, isn't doing especially well in income or education, and perceives the American dream cynically, as a kind of whites-only sham.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-not-a-merit-based-immigration-system/
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